5/13/2010 @ 6:00PM

America's Most Wired Lunch Trucks

The humble 144-character tweet is changing the way we eat–even at lunch trucks.

A plethora of food trucks serving hip and exotic cuisines are rolling into cities and towns across the country, and they’re using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook to advertise their gastronomic offerings and provide up-to-the-minute location information.

In the Los Angeles area, Kogi BBQ’s trucks have nearly 63,000 followers on Twitter and more than 10,000 on Facebook who come for short rib tacos and Kimchi in quesadillas.

Seattle’s Skillet Street Food “airstream trailer,” which serves up bacon jam and burgers made from grass-fed beef, has more than 6,000 Twitter and Facebook followers.

In the tiny desert town of Marfa, Texas, the Food Shark truck makes fusion Texan and Mediterranean fare and has attracted more than 500 Twitter followers.

Then there’s Rickshaw Dumpling Truck in New York City. You can get pork and Chinese chive dumplings and edamame dumplings from this truck, which has nearly 5,000 Twitter followers.

Indeed, social media has upgraded the lunch trucks once known as “roach coaches” by connecting customers with trucks specializing in niche foods that they wouldn’t be able to find without Twitter and Facebook (and their iPhone).

“People from all around [Los Angeles] and all around the Southland follow these trucks,” says Ivan Pardo of local favorites such as Kogi BBQ, The Grilled Cheese Truck and Coolhaus, which sells custom-made ice cream sandwiches. Prado’s website, TruxMap, helps track food trucks as they roll through Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.

For lunch truck owners, social media isn’t a trendy gimmick, it’s a serious business tool.

From the get go, Kate McEachern used Twitter, Yelp and Facebook to advertise her Cupkates truck, which sells gourmet cupcakes. Cupkates currently has 5,000 followers on Twitter and Facebook. “Social media is a huge part of our marketing strategy, if not the principle tenant,” McEachern says.

In addition to providing updates on the truck’s daily stops, McEachern says social media tools give her instant customer feedback. “It’s helped us get better and sharper. You have to listen to what people are saying,” she says. “You have to take everything on Facebook and Twitter as an honest assessment.”

For example, after customers tweeted that the lines at the cupcake truck were getting too long, McEachern started taking pre-orders.

Social media tools also allow McEachern to quickly poll customers on new cupcake flavors. Salted caramel won recently.

McEachern says it’s gotten to the point where Cupkates “customers answer other customers’ questions, like ambassadors for the company” on Twitter, Facebook and Yelp. “I’m not sure what we would do if Facebook and Twitter collapsed tomorrow,” she says.

Although trendy food trucks are traveling into new towns every day, some cities like Chicago still don’t have them. But don’t blame local chefs, though. Trucks that cook food to order are banned in the Windy City.

“We’re not having to downplay the stereotype of the roach coach,” jokes Matt Maroni, who has launched an online campaign to legalize food trucks at chicagofoodtrucks.com as he works with city officials to change city regulations to allow cooking in trucks.

Maroni will be opening his own truck, dubbed the Gaztro-wagon, soon. It will specialize in foods that can be prepared before the truck rolls, such as salads, smoked fish and other treats. And of course, Maroni’s truck will have a Twitter feed.

To be sure, some of the best fare still can’t be found online at all. San Francisco’s El Tonayense trucks, which specializes in Mexican tacos and burritos, is one social media holdout. Co-owner Marisela Santana says she didn’t have a website for its trucks and restaurant until just a couple of years ago.

“We’re old school still,” Santana says of her 16-year-old business “We haven’t even looked at Twitter. You write things on it and people write back? With the kids and the restaurant, I don’t have time to sit and write. Right now, we’re good.”